­Protecting Apes Could Backfire

By Peter D. Walsh

Sept. 26, 2015

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CreditWard Zwart

Cambridge, England — A NEW listing under the Endangered Species Act effectively bans the use of captive chimpanzees in human biomedical research. This might seem like good news. But this action to protect the welfare of captive chimpanzees by classifying them as endangered could unintentionally deliver a serious blow to wild apes. Efforts to develop and deploy vaccines against Ebola and other infectious diseases ravaging these animals could grind to a halt.

Commercial bushmeat hunting and habitat loss have caused catastrophic declines in chimpanzee and gorilla populations. But disease has become a third driver of the unfolding African ape apocalypse. Most notably, the Ebola virus has in recent decades killed perhaps one-third of the world’s gorilla population and an untold number of chimpanzees. Spillover of human respiratory viruses from tourists and intestinal parasites from local villagers are also serious dangers. Other naturally occurring threats such as anthrax, malaria and the ancestor of H.I.V. are also taking their toll.

Luckily, there could be a solution: oral vaccination. The distribution of millions of vaccine-laced oral baits has virtually eradicated fox rabies from Western Europe. A similar approach could be used to try to protect wild gorillas and chimpanzees from Ebola and many other disease threats. In fact, the virologist Matthias Schnell of Thomas Jefferson University and I recently completed the first oral Ebola vaccine trial on captive chimpanzees at the New Iberia Research Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

But developing an oral vaccine with the potential for distribution in the wild will require several additional trial rounds. These trials must use captive apes because authorities in Africa will risk vaccinating critically endangered gorillas and endangered chimpanzees in the wild only if a vaccine has been found to be safe and effective in captive animals.

Captive trials like ours could be permitted under the new endangered species listing, which took effect on Sept. 14. But invasive procedures (drawing blood, for instance, or administering injections) now require a permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service. These permits will be issued only for research that benefits chimpanzees in the wild.

Not a single research facility has applied for a permit so far. Whether any will is unclear. One reason may be that it would be sure to attract the vocal opposition of those opposed to biomedical research on chimpanzees.

The other concern is whether there will even be chimpanzees available, now that human-focused research is no longer allowed. Two years ago, in a separate action, the National Institutes of Health began winding down research on chimpanzees and retiring all but 50 of its animals. Another 370 or so are housed at various biomedical research facilities. How much longer will these facilities continue to pay the enormous expense involved in housing these chimpanzees, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per animal over a lifetime? Probably not long.

In the case of our research, continuing to run safe, scientifically rigorous Ebola vaccine trials involving repeated anesthesia of perhaps 50 chimps will require state of the art clinical facilities.

A few major zoos have the technical capacity to do this but they don’t have enough animals and are petrified of being attacked as modern-day vivisectionists. Ape sanctuaries do have enough animals but don’t have the facilities and personnel to safely conduct trials.

The only facilities staffed, equipped and willing to run safe and rigorous vaccine trials are primate biomedical research facilities. In our case, the Louisiana lab, which has underwritten all of the on-site costs of our initial trial, has not yet decided whether to seek a permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service to continue this work. So at the moment, we have no place to complete our research.

One path forward for this sort of chimp research would be to bring an existing primate sanctuary in Africa up to standard or to build a facility there. But this would require many millions of dollars in start-up money.

A third option is to maintain a dedicated conservation research population at an existing primate biomedical facility in the United States. This would deliver a high standard of safety and scientific rigor without substantial start-up costs.

But this will still cost money. Completing our Ebola vaccine research, for instance, will require roughly $2 million more, and another $3 million to vaccinate large numbers of apes in Africa. And it will cost perhaps $1 million a year to maintain chimpanzees for this and future work.

Many wild chimps have died over the decades in the process of stocking research labs. And, as the N.I.H itself has pointed out, “Americans have benefited greatly from the chimpanzees’ service to biomedical research.” Is it too much to ask that the agency now reallocate some of the resources intended to retire its chimpanzees to maintain a population specifically dedicated to the conservation of our closest wild relative?

Peter D. Walsh is a lecturer in primate ecology at Cambridge University.